Walking into Henry Dimbleby's kitchen in Hackney, there are mounds of wooden vegetables, along with tea sets belonging to the Leon co-founder's chatty two-year-old daughter, Dory, the youngest of his three children. But what really catches your eye is the gleaming steel hood of his ocakbasi grill, normally seen in Turkish restaurants.

"It came from two desires," he says, one hand grinding some fantastically strong-smelling coffee beans, the other tickling the toddler's belly as she sits on his hip. "Firstly, because I wanted to be able to face my guests when I'm cooking and not be squirrelled away while they all sit and chat. In that sense, when you're making dinner for people, it can all get a bit steamy and oppressive." The second was his love for grilling.

"One of the first jobs I had for Bruno [Loubet, whom Dimbleby trained under at the Four Seasons Inn on the Park in London] was grilling hundreds and hundreds of courgettes on a similar set-up to this, getting the dark, charred lines on them. You might think it was boring, but something obviously stuck."

It wasn't easy finding the perfect kit for his home kitchen, though – "all the original hoods I looked at were a bit … industrial" – and it was during a walk through his local neighbourhood, Hackney Central, when inspiration struck. "I wandered somewhere I don't usually wander, down by the Overground railway arches, and came across the guys who make the hoods for most of the fantastic ocakbasi restaurants in the area. I popped in and asked if they could install one for me. If you're wanting to shift large quantities of smoke, they're your men."

Were they dubious? "Not at all. They obliged, allowing me to now grill away to my heart's content without smoking everyone out."

The power of its extraction serves another purpose, too. "I can be quite forgetful," he whispers, "so it's actually quite good to have something to lift the smells of burnt food away."